Horse sense

How we define good horsemanship?
Generally, the word implies practices and skills without regard to learning theory. Its traditional focus has been on handling and husbandry that encompassed knowledge of nutrition, conformation, reproduction, farriery and veterinary skills.
Horsemanship tends to reflect detailed knowledge of functional patterns of behaviour typical to the species and is more or less aligned with the correct application of learning theory, even if practitioners do not appreciate the meaning of the science in their art. It covers a multitude of skills, including stable management, horse keeping and horse training, but has recently been re-packaged by proponents of so-called horse whispering and Natural Horsemanship.

But one word represents and includes the full meaning: horse sense. Horse sense generally refers to the inherent way of being that some people have around horses. Their timing, sensitivity, and resolve to pursue a training opportunity allow them to get the best out of their horse. Timing and consistency are the first principles for obtaining the right response. But even with the best timing and consistency some people fail to achieve calmness in horse and, given that calmness is a precursor o optimal training, these practitioners can never excel in training. This is due to the horse sense or to the lack of it.
There is a persistent belief that a special connection exists between women and horses and that this allows them to train horses easier than men.

For centuries shamans, medicine men and gypsies would travel from village to village plying their skills. The reason their practices were often called ‘whispering’ relates to the calmness of horses. Using the same skills as shamans of old, modern horse whisperers have a renaissance, sparked by the Nicolas Evans book ‘The horse whisperer’ and the Robert Redford movie. “
…Around that time I was staying with a friend in Devon, in the southwest of England, and at supper one evening I heard another friend of his (a veterinarian farrier, called Robbie Richardson) telling someone he had once seen a ‘horse whisperer’ at work. I had been around horses since I was a young boy, but until that moment had never heard that term. Robbie told me how this traveling horseman had transformed a traumatized pony back to the loving, sweet-natured creature it had once been…” Nicolas Evans.